Thread: CHOOSING LESSER EVILS

CHOOSING LESSER EVILS


http://www.newswithviews.com/Seese/dorothy18.htm

Dorothy A. Seese
June 14, 2005
NewsWithViews.com

Don't start telling me I live in a free country because that is terribly annoying, I find it offensive, and you don't want to offend me. Even if you do, our government doesn't want you to because it is probably a hate crime now and they have enough things to prosecute, like "al-Qaeda" suspects who disappear in the night.

In 1997 I chose to apply for Social Security because I could no longer work. Being without a job left me with no medical coverage, which is hazardous to one's health (and so is medical care at times). In the early 1950's, the federal government actually made a commercial for television to inform a reluctant American public that Social Security was insurance, not welfare. Half the premiums were paid for by the employee (note that FICA deduction on your check stub, that 's it) and the other half is paid by your employer(s). It was called a trust fund and people believed it. It is still called a trust fund, but far fewer of us believe that trash now.

So I opted to go on what is now a dole. It has been a dole since former president Lyndon B. Johnson raided the nonexistent trust fund which consisted of entries on federalized IOU's hidden somewhere in Kentucky or thereabouts. I think they call them bonds, but perhaps not. Whatever the case, it was either live in a tree, in a back alley, or go on Social Security. The SS Dole was kind enough to give me 100% disability for my fractured spine and presto, I was on the dole! It was a choice wasn't it? I elected to take the dole rather than live on the streets. It wasn't the kind of choice we think of as actual choice, but ... it was a choice of sorts.

This morning I read about a man who went to England on vacation with his wife. Their ordeal with the UK's socialized medicine required contacts in high places to get even minimally good treatment until the woman could be returned to the US for proper care. Socialized medicine works roughly the same as our medicine: the people with the influence and the money get the good stuff, the rest of us get the leftovers. However, when I had a coronary occlusion in August of 2004, my HMO paid for all but $75 of a $700 ambulance bill to transport me nine-tenths of a mile to the emergency room, and from there I went into surgery and then the hospital ICU. That was a $59,000 angioplasty, aka rooter job, on a coronary artery. The cardiologist on call for E/R did an excellent job, or at least I think so because the stent hasn't collapsed. I even went back a month later for a second stent in another coronary artery. Inside plumbing jobs cost money, lots of it. One difference between doctors in the US and doctors in a nation with socialized medicine is that doctors in the US charge overwhelming sums for their expertise and to cover their med-mal insurance premiums. Where there is socialized medicine, the doctors are like any other tradesperson and there's no hope of real wealth. There is apt to come with that a dearth of truly qualified doctors, as experts flee the country to find the money trail.

Thus in the field of medical care we seem to have a choice: socialized medicine which distributes equally lousy care for all except the influential, or the free market system where the rich get the best and the rest of us are on a lottery when it comes to getting doctors who are worth their salt. Is that a choice? What happened to the 1960's when doctors wanted to practice medicine rather than high finance? And hospitals were affordable to most all folks? And people weren't this sick anyway?

I don't like today's "choices" very much, in fact they're disgusting.

Lest anyone think I'm ungrateful to be alive, let that not become part of this analysis. Of course I'm grateful that my HMO plan provided reasonable hospitalization, a very small ambulance copay, and the cardiologist on call for E/R was an expert. I've known co-workers who died during the angioplasty procedure. While I might call it an expensive plumbing rooter job, it does take a lot more education and expertise to run a balloon into a coronary artery and properly place a stent than it does to open a sewer line. I respect the cardiologist, I just didn't like his attitude.

Now comes the "medical savings account" to solve all the medical cost problems. Most folks cannot save enough to buy birthday presents for their families, much less create medical savings accounts. So again, we're back to the high-income bracket folks having the wherewithal to do what needs to be done and the rest of us struggling to put daily food on the table and keep the children in clothes and shoes.

Of course if one is an illegal alien, they get all these goods and services handed to them free, courtesy of the US taxpayers who don't receive equal treatment for their generosity.

It's a choice (and a damned bad one) for the US government to cater to illegal aliens on the false premise that they have weapons of mass destruction.. OOOPS wrong lie ... sorry about that ... on the false premise they do work Americans won't do, so we need them.


Well? Put them to work then, legalize them and let them feel what it's like to be an American citizen with a lot of lousy choices rather than a victim who needs amnesty. Cutting off freebies and getting these blighters to work might change their minds about crossing the border when it's 112 at midday. Of course, only a few of those twits survive anyway.

And make them speak English. No habla espanol! Or Chinese, or any other "ese" around. We had good laws, refused to enforce those and brought in a new set of laws to rob Americans of their rights under the Constitution and its Bill of Rights. We who were born here, whose ancestry goes back farther than we can trace, have to live under the "new laws" which are draconian, fit only for a government run by Attila or Robert Mugabe, the "benefactor" of Rhodesia/Zimbabwe. We do, then they do. It's a choice our government needs to make if they aren't going to seal the borders until the next disaster occurs.

Most of what used to be choice, such as which television program to watch, is now default. Turn off the set, it's all lousy. We don't have much choice about where we live, either. Even in the seven years I've been in Sun City, prices have skyrocketed so much that today, I could not buy the place where I am living. More people are being forced out of the housing market or forced to live in neighborhoods not of their choice and hope their children survive an element that shouldn't exist in America, the drug/gang areas. The houses look nice in the television commercials but the neighborhoods decline rapidly once the area is settled. The so-called choice now is, which lousy neighborhood is likely to be safer?

Auto manufacturers seem to take up most of the commercial time on the channels I watch, which largely have to do with news, weather, food or home decorating. Maybe some history from time to time. Auto commercials dominate. Did it ever occur to these auto makers that only a small percentage of the public needs a new vehicle? They're over-manufacturing to a saturated public that doesn't want or cannot afford a new car, truck or SUV. It doesn't matter that each auto manufacturer has choice available. To the public, the choice is clear, either go in hock for six years of uncertainty or keep the old flivver and get it fixed. One of the US "big three" is planning to lay off 25,000 employees over the next couple of years. If they had planned correctly to take a certain market share and built to that share, they wouldn't have to lay off people.

For all of the above, nowhere is there now less choice in the USA than in politics. We have been voting the lesser of the evils now for years, which is why the rest of the lousy choices came into being. We didn't get involved, we didn't understand what was going on, and we didn't believe those who told us -- we called them ugly names and dissed them quickly in favor of managed media.


It isn't clear yet whether the majority of American people really realize that the ability to choose between potatoes or rice pilaf isn't what's meant by "freedom" in our founding documents.

Perhaps choosing between lesser evils, if any is really lesser, has so saturated our minds that we've forgotten there was once a lot more freedom and a lot less government intervention. But at the same time, there were a lot fewer people crying for the government to "do something."


If ever there was a choice that should have been indelibly impressed on every American, it is that every person added to a government payroll takes away from several other Americans their freedoms and rights.

Government has no funds except what it takes from the people, and our own citizens have paid for the chains of bondage in which they live, the unjust wars for which they or their family members die, and the soaring costs of a government they can no longer afford to support.

And the majority probably still doesn't see it.

They "see" it....I mean....how can they miss it.

They just don't "believe" what it means.....yet, but they will. And very soon.

Globalists...you're over.